The Gallup-AccessLex Institute study of Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree holders provides important insights for educators, employers, law school alumni and prospective students about the factors that contribute to great jobs, lives and experiences for law school graduates. A law degree is one of the most valuable advanced degrees as evaluated by law graduates and other degree holders. As described in the key findings, most law graduates strongly agree that they would still get a J.D. if given the opportunity to go back and do it all over again. Furthermore, nearly half strongly agree that their degree was worth the cost. While many recent law graduates have negative views of the J.D., graduates who are more advanced in their careers tend to have higher levels of well-being and more positive assessments of the value of a J.D.

As most of you know, on Tuesday morning U.S. News released to law schools an embargoed confidential electronic version of the 2019 edition of its annual rankings to be published online on Tuesday, March 20. At Pepperdine, we immediately analyzed the data U.S. News used in calculating our ranking. To our horror, we learned that we had made an inadvertent data entry error in reporting our median LSAT for the class that began in Fall, 2017.

We immediately contacted U.S. News Tuesday morning to inform them of the error and requested that they update the rankings with the correct median LSAT. On Tuesday afternoon, anonymous source(s) leaked the embargoed rankings which were posted on several blogs, showing Pepperdine’s ranking as 59 (up from 72 last year).

Unfortunately, U.S. News has denied our request and instead issued a revised embargoed electronic version of the rankings that replaced the original. In the new version, Pepperdine is removed from the rankings. Instead, Pepperdine is listed as “unranked due to a data reporting error by the school.”

We contacted three law school rankings experts — Bill Henderson (Indiana), Andy Morriss (Texas A&M), and Mike Spivey (Spivey Consulting) — who all confirmed our analysis that Pepperdine would have ranked 62nd or 64th had U.S. News recomputed the rankings with our correct LSAT median.

It is, of course, deeply disappointing to be unranked for a year. But the reality is that we made great progress in the rankings this year, and should continue our ascent next year.

Here is the March Madness Law School Bracket, with outcomes determined by the 2018 U.S. News Law School Rankings (using academic peer reputation and student quality as tiebreakers). The Final Four are Pennsylvania (7), Michigan (8), Virginia (8), and UCLA (15), with Penn beating Virginia in the championship game.

The University of Florida's College of Nursing originally reported its fiscal year 2016 NIH educational and practical initiative grants and expenditures at $1,684,495. The school informed U.S. News the corrected value for its fiscal year 2016 NIH grants was $0. ...

New associate hiring held strong in 2017, with the country’s largest 100 law firms bringing on 4,199 recent law graduates. Among the 50 schools most popular with those firms, 29 percent of last year’s graduates landed associate jobs, up slightly from the previous year. We’ve ranked the top 50 law schools according to the percentage of their 2017 juris doctor graduates who took associate jobs at the largest 100 firms.

Columbia

Chicago

NYU

Virginia

Pennsylvania

Northwestern

Duke

Harvard

Cornell

UC-Berkeley

Stanford

Georgetown

Vanderbilt

Michigan

UCLA

USC

Texas

Yale

Boston University

Fordham

Columbia Law School Tops The List Columbia Law School has landed at the No. 1 spot on our Go-To List for half a decade. In 2017, the Manhattan school sent nearly 68 percent of graduates into Big Law associate jobs.

BY THE NUMBERSThe Top 50 Go-To Law Schools These schools sent the highest percentage of 2017 graduates to associate jobs at the largest 100 firms.

The National Jurist analyzed ABA grant and scholarship data, using the number of scholarships per school, the percentage of students receiving scholarships and the scholarship amount at the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles to estimate an average grant amount. With an average, it then determined the average tuition discount per school.

The median private law school discounted tuition by 28.3 percent, with an average scholarship of $20,129. That was up from 25.4 percent from two years earlier and significantly higher than 2010, when it was an estimated 16 percent.

Here are the 20 private law schools with the highest tuition discounts:

Robert Morse (Chief Data Strategist, U.S. News & World Report) announced today that the new 2019 law school rankings will be released on Tuesday, March 20. Here is my coverage of the current 2018 law school rankings:

This annual survey provides tax employers the opportunity to vote for the best U.S. undergraduate, graduate and legal programs from their perspective for the 2017-2018 school year. 370 total respondents (U.S. tax hiring authorities, from both corporate in-house tax departments and professional service firms). This respondent total is up from 321 the previous year.

Two months ago, I posted a blog with projections for the 2018 application cycle based on the initial Current Volume Report from the LSAC. I am writing now to update the applicant pool projection and provide some further analysis regarding the composition of the applicant pool.

The applicant pool remains up nearly 10% over last year as of late January. As of January 19, there were 29,287 applicants at a point in time when 48% of the final applicant count had been received last year. That extrapolates to approximately 61,000 applicants. As of February 3, there were 35,974 applicants at a point in time when 58% of the final applicant count had been received last year. That extrapolates to approximately 62,000 applicants. So, at the moment, we probably still can anticipate a total applicant pool for the year in a range from 61,000 to perhaps 63,000, depending upon exactly how things unfold over the coming months.

A total applicant pool of 61,000-63,000 would be the largest applicant volume since the 2011-2012 admissions cycle, which saw a total applicant pool of roughly 67,900. For the last four years, the applicant pool has hovered around 55,000-56,000. (Note that due to changes in LSAC reporting on total applicant pool starting in 2016, the comparisons with prior years are not exactly apples to apples.)

Fall 2018 First-Year Class May Be 40,000-41,000

If the percentage of applicants who become matriculants remains around 66% for the current admissions cycle (roughly the average over the last several years as show in Table 1), the entering class in fall 2018 would be between 40,000 and 41,000 first-year students (up roughly 10%).

Improvement in Strength of Applicant Pool (and Matriculants)

While the increasing size of the applicant pool is certainly good news for law schools, for highly-ranked law schools there is some even better news buried in the details of the Current Volume Report. From 2010 to 2017, while the overall applicant volume declined from roughly 87,900 to roughly 56,000, the “composition” of the entering class profile also shifted. During this period, the percentage of applicants and matriculants with a high LSAT of 165 or higher declined, with the percentage of applicants dropping from over 14% to less than 12%, and the percentage of matriculants dropping from just over 18% to just over 15%.

TABLE 1 -- Percentage of Applicants and Matriculants with a High LSAT Score of 165 or Higher from 2010-2017 Based on National Decision Profile Data

According to Poets & Quants, Temple has leveraged its No. 1 U.S. News rankings to expand enrollment in the online M.B.A. program, with a price tag of $59,760. In the last year alone, Temple was able to increase student enrollment by 57 percent to 546 students from 351, one of the largest percentage increases of any online M.B.A. offering.

We’ve mashed together the latest nonresident tuition and fees data from the American Bar Association (which law schools provide to it) with the U.S. News numbers to present the 20 cheapest law schools ranked in the U.S. News top 100.

The law school deliberately enrolled a smaller class this fall in an effort to keep the GPA and standardized test scores of its incoming class in the top-tier of law schools nationwide, the school’s dean told the Faculty Senate Friday.

Dean Blake Morant told faculty that the law school brought in about 9 percent fewer new students this fall as compared to years past. In total the school’s enrollment dropped by about 250 students compared to last fall, according to statistics from the Office of Institutional Research and Planning.

Christopher Ryan of Vanderbilt University and Bryan Frye of the University of Kentucky conducted the analysis that will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Alabama Law Review.

Their premise is simple: Judge the quality of law schools based on where the most qualified students go. These candidates have the most at stake and gather a huge amount of information, so you can gauge school quality based on their choices.

Compared to their position in the U.S. News rankings, seven law schools made significant gains and placed in the Top 50 of the country's 204 law schools.

The Most Undervalued Law Schools

Law School

LSAT/UGPA Rank

US News Rank

Spots Gained

BYU

20

46

26

Pepperdine

47

72

25

Nebraska

37

57

20

William & Mary

24

41

17

Northeastern

48

65

17

SMU

35

46

11

George Mason

32

41

9

Rob Anderson asks whether a law school's LSAT and UGPA meadians are a leading indicator of its future U.S. News ranking:

For the top moot court programs, winning is just a happy side effect. Preparing students to practice law and argue in court is what moot court is really all about. ...

[The] University of Houston Law Center’s Blakely Advocacy Institute ... uses a scoring system that assesses the quality of the competitions a school participated in, the size of the competitions and the school’s performance in those competitions to determine the top 16 programs in the nation.

If you ask Daniel Linna, professor of law at Michigan State University College of Law, what changes he’d like to see in legal education around technology, he probably won’t share a list of programs and curricular offerings he’s helped put together. Nor is he likely to tell you offhand what changes some of his colleagues at other schools have instituted. Instead, he’ll tell you to check the data.

“We need to become more data-driven in this industry. We can’t just talk about innovation, we can’t just talk about technology. We’ve got to describe what it is, and then we’ve got to measure it,” Linna said.

Linna is director of MSU Law’s LegalRnD program, which trains students in leveraging technology and nontraditional workflows for what its website refers to as “leaner, more effective legal-service delivery.” In August, Linna and a group of students launched the Legal Services Innovation Index, a data collection of law firms’ use of technology and “innovative” workflows.

The 2019 U.S. News Tax Rankings ballots are due on Friday (the 2018 rankings are here) As in prior years, the survey is intended "to identify the law schools having the top programs in tax law." The survey is sent "to a selection of faculty members involved in tax law programs. Law schools supplied names of these faculty members to U.S. News in summer 2017." Recipients are asked "to [i]dentify up to fifteen (15) schools that have the highest-quality tax law courses or programs. In making your choices consider all elements that contribute to a program's academic excellence, for example, the depth and breadth of the program, faculty research and publication record, etc."

As Donald Tobin (Dean, Maryland) has noted, it is more than strange that NYU has finished ahead of Florida and Georgetown each year that U.S. News has conducted the survey. Because the survey ranks the schools by how often they appear on the respondents' "Top 15" lists, this means that some folks list NYU, but not Florida and Georgetown, among the Top 15 tax programs.

This essay summarizes the results of the U.S. News & World Report (“U.S. News”) rankings published in 2016 and 2017 with respect to the academic reputation scores of law schools. In contrast to the general trend over the last twenty years, the U.S. News academic reputation scores for law schools improved in both 2016 and 2017. With respect to the 172 law schools analyzed as part of a longitudinal study published by this author four years ago, law school academic reputation scores improved by an aggregate of 4.1 points in 2016 and by another 5.9 points in 2017. These recent increases offset declines from 2014 and 2015 and brought the average academic reputation score for the law schools in the data set back to 2.542, virtually the same average for those law schools in 2013.4 The median score of the law schools in the data set rose in 2017 as well, from 2.3 to 2.4.

The Princeton Review tallied its lists based on its surveys of 19,900 students attending the 169 law schools [an average of 118 per school]. The 80-question survey asked students to rate their schools on several topics and report on their experiences. Some ranking list tallies also factored in school-reported data.

Best Professors: Based on student answers to survey questions concerning how good their professors are as teachers and how accessible they are outside the classroom.

Virginia

Duke

Boston University

Stanford

Chicago

Pepperdine

Washington & Lee

Notre Dame

Boston College

Charleston

Best Quality of Life: Based on student answers to survey questions on: whether there is a strong sense of community at the school, whether differing opinions are tolerated in the classroom, the location of the school, the quality of social life at the school, the school's research resources (library, computer and database resources).

The approach used by US News includes a variety of factors with varying weights but among the most important are factors based on surveys of academics and of lawyers and judges. Specifically, the US News ranking methodology is based 25% on "peer assessment score" (academics) and 15% on "assessment score by lawyers and judges." The both categories are weighted heavier than LSAT scores (.125) and GPA (.10), which are the raw material for the Ryan and Frye ranking.

As might be expected, the Ryan and Frye rankings correlate strongly with US News rankings, but there are some significant outliers. ... [I] thought it might be interesting to examine the potential causes of divergence between the Ryan-Frye approach and US News by comparing the US News survey-based rankings between 1993 (the year of the first full ranking of law schools) and 2018 (the most recent ranking).

The peer ranking is the largest single component of US News and is measured somewhat comparably across the years so I will focus on that component of US News. The chart below shows a plot of the 1993 peer rankings (then called "academic" rankings) and those for 2018. Because higher ranked schools have lower ranking numbers, the highest ranked schools are in the lower left and the lowest ranked schools in the upper right. Schools above the line have improved in their rankings between 1993 and 2018. Schools below the line have lower rankings in 2018 than in 1993.

The correlation between the 1993 peer ranks and the 2018 peer ranks is .93, which is evidence of incredible stability over time. As a result, the 1993 rank can predict with a high degree of accuracy the 2018 rank, especially for the higher-ranked schools (the lower left). However, there are some notable outliers, which I've noted with text in the figure. It is interesting to note that among the largest gainers are three that changed names by affiliating with an existing university (Michigan State, New Hampshire, and Quinnipiac). The remainder of the schools with large jumps in peer rankings (Alabama, CUNY, Georgia State, and Pepperdine) have other explanations. My institution (Pepperdine) and Alabama have made major pushes toward emphasis on research productivity, which may explain the changes in their scores. ...

America’s universities are getting two report cards this year. The first, from the Equality of Opportunity Project, brought the shocking revelation that many top universities, including Princeton and Yale, admit more students from the top 1 percent of earners than the bottom 60 percent combined. The second, from U.S. News and World Report, is due on Tuesday — with Princeton and Yale among the contenders for the top spot in the annual rankings.

The two are related: A POLITICO review shows that the criteria used in the U.S. News rankings — a measure so closely followed in the academic world that some colleges have built them into strategic plans — create incentives for schools to favor wealthier students over less wealthy applicants.

The National Jurist took into consideration all forms of post-graduation employment. The employment rates were weighted, giving the most heft to full-time jobs that require bar passage. Other jobs, such as J.D.-advantage jobs and positions in other professions, received less weight.

As the legal market continues to rebound and moves closer to pre-recession levels, law schools big and small are bolstering employer outreach efforts and reconsidering their curricula to strengthen graduate employability. Looking at this year’s employment statistics to find the most improved employment rates, The National Jurist took into consideration all forms of post-graduation employment. The employment rates were weighted, giving the most heft to full-time jobs that require bar passage. Other jobs, such as J.D.-advantage jobs and positions in other professions, received less weight.

The best proxy for how other law professors react and respond to publishing in main, or flagship, law reviews is the US News and World Report (USNWR) rankings. This paper utilizes historical USNWR data to rank the top 100 law reviews. The USNWR rankings are important in shaping many — if not most — law professors’ perceptions about the relative strength of a law school (and derivatively, the home law review). This document contains a chart that is sorted by the 10-year rolling average for each school, but it also contains the 5-year and 15-year rolling averages. This paper also describes my methodology and responds to a series of frequently asked questions. The document was updated in August 2017.

Here are the Top 25 law schools based on their 10-year rolling average overall U.S. News ranking:

On a very regular basis we see reports on the state of how many people are taking the LSAT, applying to law school, actually enrolling in law schools, comparing applicants’ LSAT and GPA credentials with students from previous years, as well as how law schools’ graduates fared in the job market. This latter category has become a bit more complex and slightly more honest, including paying attention to whether the jobs were subsidized by the law schools in an effort to improve the placement statistics, required a law degree and bar passage, or if an advantage was created for people who had received a law degree.

This entire process of “casting bones” to interpret whether law schools have weathered the storm of declining demand for their educational services is mainly a bunch of unproductive “navel gazing”. This is because it fails to look closely at what is happening in the world external to the parochial focus of law schools in terms of specific tiers of the legal profession, the dramatic and increasing shrinkage in jobs of many kinds — including law — alternative ways to obtain “law knowledge” and legal services, flat or declining wages over an extended period, the rise of the “gig” economy, and the aging of the American population and the significant financial and employment pressures under which Millennials are now functioning.

For the top 10 schools, the average number of applications was 602 for fall 2016. The average among all 103 schools was around 183. Below are the 10 schools that received the most part-time law school applications for the fall 2016 entering class.

At its June 1-2 meeting, the ABA Council for the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar approved a proposal to completely eviscerate the steps it approved in 2015 to assure greater transparency in reporting law-school-funded positions. Indeed, the Council went even further, changing the rules to make it impossible for anyone to discover what number/percentage of a law school’s graduates are in law-school-funded positions, so long as those positions pay $40,000.

The Council did this with no notice, no chance for comment, and no presentation of possible concerns associated with this change. Rather, it simply approved a proposal purporting to simplify reporting of employment outcomes that was submitted by one Council member, Paul Mahoney, whose law school was among several that would benefit from the reclassification of law-school-funded positions.

More significantly, in approving the proposal, the Council also approved several other changes in reporting of employment outcomes that merit much more discussion. These changes, discussed below, were not meaningfully discussed in the proposal, nor do they appear to have been meaningfully discussed by the Council in approving the proposal. Once again, there was no notice of these changes, no chance for comment, and no presentation of possible concerns associated with these changes.

It pains me to write this, as I hold the members of the Council in high regard and believe the Council has done a very good job over the last several years navigating legal education through uncharted waters, particularly with its emphasis on increased transparency regarding conditional scholarships and employment outcomes.

In this instance, however, the Council’s laudable desire to support simplification in reporting of employment outcomes meant that a number of other policy considerations that merit much more attention and thoughtful deliberation did not get due consideration prior to the Council taking action that effectively erodes transparency.

The Council should rescind its action, and send out the proposed changes for notice and comment and for consideration by the Standard’s Review Committee, which can give due consideration to intended and unintended consequences in recommending an appropriate set of changes regarding the reporting of employment outcomes.

The U.S. News & World Report “Best Law Schools Rankings” define the market for legal education. Law schools compete to improve their standing in the rankings and fear any decline. But the U.S. News rankings incite contention, because they rely on factors that are poor proxies for quality like peer reputation and expenditures per student. While many alternative law school rankings exist, none have challenged the market dominance of the U.S. News rankings. Presumably the U.S. News rankings benefit from a first-mover advantage, other rankings fail to provide a clearly superior alternative, or some combination of the two.

The Chinese Characters in the title of this piece are the closest thing to the apocryphal “Chinese curse” of “may you live in interesting times.” The closest actual proverb is “Better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than to be a human in a chaotic period. This seems a fitting metaphor for what has been going on in legal education since 2008, when things began to get “interesting.” That the attribution of the English version of the curse is apocryphal and that I’ve taken the “true” meaning from Wikipedia (although I did check with a native Chinese-speaking friend, who assures me that Wikipedia is accurate on this point) is a good metaphor for rankings and their impact on legal education. Applicants, law review editors, alumni, and many more people rely on US News’s law school rankings to evaluate law schools, as secure in their knowledge that these are a valid source of information on relative merit as are those people who confidently attribute the “may you live in interesting times” version of the curse to a non-existent Chinese language source are in theirs.

Just as the apocryphal curse bears a resemblance to an actual proverb about dogs and peaceful times, so the US News rankings reflect — if through rather blurry glass — where legal education is. With the caveats that there are many bad things that have come from rankings, and from the illusory precision of US News rankings in particular, and that a great deal of what the rankings reflect is a fairly stable pecking order, as well as having tortured this metaphor as far as I can, let’s look at the data that US News uses and see what it reveals about where legal education is headed.

I describe how existing measures of faculty scholarly output (publications) and influence (law review citations, Google Scholar citations (H-Index and M-Index), and SSRN downloads) can be used to (1) compare a law school faculty's scholarly productivity to its peers and to assess individual faculty contributions in these areas; and (2) value scholarly productivity of both junior and senior faculty. I then offer some thoughts on what these existing ranking metrics leave out in quantifying faculty contributions to law school success, especially at faith-based schools.

My co-panelists are:

John August (Dean of Faculties and Associate Provost, Texas A&M)

Gary Lucas (Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Assessment, Strategic Analysis, and Reporting, Texas A&M)

Gregory Sisk (Laghi Distinguished Chair in Law, University of St. Thomas (Minnesota))

Welcome to the third annual College Access Index. It's a New York Times ranking of colleges — those with a five-year graduation rate of at least 75 percent — based on their commitment to economic diversity. The ranking is based on a combination of the number of lower-and middle-income students that a college enrolls and the price it charges these students. The top of the ranking is dominated by campuses in the University of California system, while the most diverse private colleges include Amherst, Pomona, Harvard and Vassar. Notably, a college's endowment does not determine its commitment to economic diversity. There are wealthy colleges and much less wealthy ones at both the top and bottom of the ranking.

The country’s most powerful engine of upward mobility is under assault.

Public colleges have an unmatched record of lofting their students into the middle class and beyond. For decades, they have enrolled teenagers and adults from modest backgrounds, people who are often the first member of their family to attend college, and changed their trajectories.

Over the last several years, however, most states have cut their spending on higher education, some drastically. Many public universities have responded by enrolling fewer poor and middle-class students — and replacing them with affluent students who can afford the tuition. ...

The decline of economic diversity at top public colleges is the clearest pattern in The Times’s third annual ranking of leading colleges — the roughly 170 nationwide with a five-year graduation rate of at least 75 percent. (Yes, you can be disappointed that so few colleges clear that bar.)

The release of the latest ABA employment data offers an opportunity to update the three-year federal judicial clerkship placement rates. Here is the clerkship placement rate for the Classes of 2014, 2015, and 2016. Methodology and observations below the interactive visualization. The "placement" is the three-year total placement; the "percentage" is the three-year placement divided by the three-year graduating class total.

Business-school deans and research faculty at more than 20 universities are taking a stand against the academic rankings published by media outlets such as Bloomberg Businessweek, Nikkei Inc.’s Financial Times and the Economist Group.

Rather than “acquiesce to methods of comparison we know to be fundamentally misleading,” the administrators are urging their peers at other schools to stop participating in a process they say rates programs on an overly narrow set of criteria.

University of Florida Levin College of Law alumnus Hugh Culverhouse Jr. has pledged $1.5 million to be used by the school for incoming student scholarships if the law school's community raises an additional $1.5 million by Aug. 14, the first day of classes.

Culverhouse, a Coral Gables-based lawyer who graduated from the law school in 1974, said he was inspired to create the Culverhouse Challenge by the school's leap from 48 to 41 in the most recent U.S. News national rankings of law schools. It was the highest ranked law school in Florida, followed by the law schools at Florida State University (48), University of Miami (77), Stetson (96) and Florida International University (100). Six more Florida law schools were not ranked.

When I initially learned that Harvard Law would start accepting the GRE as an alternative to the LSAT, I viewed it through the prism of the US News & World Report ranking and concluded that it was a very good thing for Harvard and all of legal education. Aggressive rankings management has led to tremendous over-reliance on the LSAT. By using on the GRE, I reasoned, Harvard would have sufficient test score information to assess a candidate's intellectual capacity while also obtaining the freedom to use other admissions methods to explore the larger and more diverse universe of candidates who are destined to become great leaders and lawyers.

My thinking is crudely sketched out in the diagram below.

If Harvard Law was trying to get around U.S. News rankings formula, the USN chief strategy officer, Bob Morse, saw it coming. ...

Each year U.S. News & World Report lists law schools by the average indebtedness of their graduates. Importantly, the figures exclude accrued interest, which can be quite considerable. However, these numbers are probably the best estimate of the cost of attendance at a particular law school presented in a comparable form. The ABA does not publicize graduate debt in the 509 information reports, making U.S. News an unfortunately necessary source.

Here are the 25 law schools with the highest amount of average law school debt (among those students with law school debt).

The U.S. News & World Report ("USNWR") law school rankings include a number of illuminating bits of information and some weaknesses, as I displayed yesterday. But a cursory look at Paul Caron's display of the peer reputation scores displays, perhaps, a startling truth: law professors generally think most other law schools are pretty awful. (I qualify that with "other" because I think most law professors generally think their own schools are probably pretty good.) ...

One might expect to see a fairly ordinary distribution between 5 and 1, perhaps a bell curve with a bulk of schools in the range of 3 in the middle. But it turns out law professors think little of other schools.